Timeout (max_execution_time) implemented for Windows

Just a small heads-up - timeouts have been successfully implemented in the Win32 version of PHP 4.0. The implementation is completely different from the UNIX implementation, and behaves a bit differently, but it works and it's quite efficient too (only slightly less efficient than the UNIX equivalent). The main difference between the Win32 implementation and the UNIX implementation is that the UNIX implementation is simpler, and yet it's more robust, because it relies on an OS-level service, which can asynchronously interrupt the process when the CPU time exceeds a certain amount. With Win32, it's not quite possible to ask the OS to asynchornously interrupt you when a timeout occurs, let alone know how much CPU time you've spent (the latter is probably possible using non-standard methods, because somehow, the task manager works :). For this reason, the Win32 timeout implementation is partially synchronous. That is, the timeout will be delivered to the thread that times out asynchronously; But this message will wait for it until it reads it. What does it mean effectively? It means that under Windows, the timeouts will not be able to interrupt 3rd party library code (e.g., a function that fetches an SQL recordset, which is coming back very slowly), and it won't be able to recover from bugs in PHP/Zend (if for some reason they get stuck in an endless loop, not that this should happen anyway). Otherwise - the timeout system works quite well. There's one more inherent difference - the Win32 timeouts use the realtime clock, as opposed to paying attention to the CPU time the process/thread has taken. This may mean that a script will perform fine with a given timeout when there's no load, but will fail when the load is high, because it'll take it more real time to do the same task (even though it will take about the same CPU time). That's all. Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> http://www.zend.com/